The steel you lose between the BOM and the cut
Most fabrication floors cannot say, in kilograms, how much purchased steel becomes finished product and how much becomes scrap. I make that number visible — and controllable — by reconciling what every part should consume against what your nesting and cutting actually burn.
- Cut-to-material reconciliation — Actual consumed mass versus the BOM, corrected for the thickness each part was really cut on — so a part reused on a thicker sheet stops silently mis-stating its weight.
- Nesting yield — How much of every sheet becomes parts instead of drop, made measurable instead of assumed.
- Offcut reclamation — Usable remnants registered back into stock as inventory, not written off — so they are reused on later jobs.
- CAD-to-production continuity — Bills of materials flow from your CAD system (Inventor) into planning without manual re-entry or transcription errors.
Field Reports.
Part mass in the production record was read from each part's design thickness. When a part was reused on a thicker sheet, its true consumed mass silently diverged from the record — and no identity or quantity check caught it, so material costing and stock inherited the gap.
After every cut, produced parts are linked to the actual sheet, its real thickness is read, and the stored mass is rescaled from the design-thickness basis to the consumed-thickness basis. Planned and reconciled mass are kept side by side, and a mismatch audit flags every part whose design thickness differs from the sheet it was cut on.
Every cut now posts the steel that physically moved, in kilograms, with thickness mismatches flagged for correction instead of absorbed into unexplained variance.
A multi-line operation was losing finished-goods flow each handoff, causing delayed truck departures and recurring overtime.
Built a shift-ready handoff checklist with real-time exception ownership and escalation timers on the production floor.
Recovered EUR 195K annual disruption cost and cut delay incidents by 46% within one quarter.
Rework feedback arrived too late to adjust active batches, leading to repeated scrap on similar runs.
Reduced scrap by 31% and improved weekly output by 18% without adding headcount.
Material release decisions were centralized and delayed starts across multiple cells during demand spikes.
Shortened order start latency by 62% and saved 11 production hours per week.